Music 2.0 « Post Geographic

Music 2.0

08May07

I haven’t paid for recorded music since high school (The White Stripes’ Elephant) although I have spent a lot of money on live music. Last week, however, I broke the IP-piracy streak by paying $10 for a merely potential album. SellaBand represents a real shift in the relationship between music and money; it allows bands to raise the capital needed to record an album directly from fans.

Specifically, users on this website buy $10 (transferable and refundable) shares in bands they like, and when a band raises $50,000 in this fashion Sellaband – which was founded by former record label execs – hooks them up with the people and resources to spend this 50k on making an album. Everyone who bought a share then gets a “limited edition” copy of said album in the mail.

At this point, the concept is pretty cool. It allows fans to contribute to making an album, instead of the post facto, costs-recouping model of usual record sales. Given that modern technology means that free-riding will always be possible with music, I think that bands – especially smaller bands – are more likely to be successful in their begging beforehand than after, especially when you consider the way that music consumption can be status-seeking behaviour: your limited edition, numbered, CD is proof that you liked them before they were “mainstream” and thus are cooler than those with un-numbered discs.

There is an extra twist: the album is put up for free on SellaBand and sold at shows – for the first year, 50% of the sales revenue and 33.3% of the ad revenue from the album’s site is split proportionally among those 5,000 shares. I’m not sure whether this will actually result in any profits at all, or is just an attractive gimmick, but it sure sounds cool. Imagine being a shareholder in Funeral or You Forgot It In People.

After cruising the site, a couple observations: Some people seem to be taking the investment aspect of this seriously, with some users throwing down thousands of dollars per band (which begs the question, why aren’t they actually investing in acts instead of messing around at this site for amateurs?). I also couldn’t find much music I actually liked beyond the artist I joined the site for, after Brad Sucks mentioned it on his blog – maybe if this site or concept continues to expand I’ll find more bands to be a “shareholder” in.

The final question – given that SellaBand holds the album rights for a year and gets a piece of the ad revenue -is why do bands need this site all, why can’t they just use the same concept on their own (especially with a lower threshold)? The answer, as Brad Sucks noted when he reluctantly joined, is that artists want to get their music in front of everyone they possibly can, and it looks like SellaBand intends to have its own centralized userbase which could single-handedly make or break bands, instead of the de-centralized patchwork that would arise if each artist did this on her own.

I’m not going to say that SellaBand will single-handedly revolutionize the music industry, but their model – fan-generated capital facilitated by the internet – does have an awesome potential and is worth keeping an eye on. For now, this pirate is certainly willing to throw down $10 next time he hears something good.